How To Rank Your Podcast

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for The SEO Show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show. I'm Michael Costin and I'm sitting opposite looking into Arthur Fabik's beautiful eyes.

ARTHUR: Hello. I wasn't even looking at you. You're meant to be a bit more excited.

MICHAEL: I'm very excited.

ARTHUR: Do you know why I'm excited? Why? Because today is it's international podcast day.

MICHAEL: What makes you excited about that? Um, The acknowledgement of your hard work, the blood, sweat, and tears you put into being a podcast co-host. Co-host, yes.

ARTHUR: This day is all about you. Is it? I feel like it's more about you because you, in my eyes, you're the main host. You're, I'm just the fun extra thing on the side.

MICHAEL: You're the color commentator at Sensei in Sports. Yeah. You know what? It's about both of us. It is. And every other podcaster out there. Props to the podcasters, but we thought it would be cool in honor of this day to do an episode about doing SEO for your podcast. It's like podcastception. It is because it's been a year now that we've been running this show. And when we started out, we had no idea what we're doing. Now we know a little bit more, slightly more.

ARTHUR: We're getting there, but we're still, sometimes don't know what we're doing.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Let's be honest. But we feel that we've learned enough to talk about doing SEO for your podcast. So trying to get your podcast to show in Apple podcasts or Google podcasts, or just have some sort of organic visibility. Because if you search SEO podcast right now, if you were to go to Google and do it, guess what you see? We're number one. We're number one in the organic results.

ARTHUR: Outranking all the big SEO sites that

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Previously ranked number one. So really impressive. Um, that's SEO. I'm proud of you. Thank you. Cause you did all that.

MICHAEL: That was all you. That was me. You know what I've got? I do have to say, I don't know how competitive the world of ranking for SEO podcast is, but we got there. A little bit of work, a little bit of on-site optimisation, some links, that sort of stuff. SEO? SEO, we did some SEO. But what also happened is Google shows carousels in the search results for podcasts. And if you search SEO podcast, we're actually showing now towards the front of the carousel, which means If a person does a non-brand search SEO podcast, they're able to find our podcast, have a listen and hopefully subscribe. I'm looking now. How's it look? We're there.

ARTHUR: We're there. We're right. We're wedged between the Yoast SEO podcast and make SEO simple again.

MICHAEL: Let's take that. Is Yoast in front of us? We need to take them down.

ARTHUR: Yeah, they are. They are. Yep.

MICHAEL: We're taking you down Yoast. Okay. But look, I've got a stat for you, Arthur. Yes. Our show has been running for one year. Okay.

ARTHUR: Have we had a one year anniversary?

MICHAEL: Yeah. Okay, cool. So it's been running for about a bit more than a year. One fifth of all of our downloads have happened in the last 30 days.

ARTHUR: Yeah. You told me that and that's crazy. Yeah. So the compounding. It is the growth is compounding. Is that because we have more content, so more episodes, therefore there's a more, a higher chance that people will find an episode or organic growth, you know? Yep. People have found us and have subscribed and are now listening to us every week, which is crazy, crazy to think about.

MICHAEL: Yeah. More subscribers. We rank, like someone searches SEO podcasts. Yeah. But then we're showing in the top marketing lists in, um, Apple podcasts in Australia. Nice. So if someone's interested in marketing, they might stumble across us. Um, and all of this is not stuff that happens immediately. It's stuff that takes time to get to. It's taken us a year as we said, and we have a pretty good idea of what Google's looking at, and then also what platforms like Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts are looking at. So let's run through our totally unscientific, not, I guess, proven, it's just what we think works based on what we've done, approach to podcast SEO.

ARTHUR: I would argue that it is proven because it's worked for us, so. Sample size of one though. Well,

MICHAEL: 100% success rate. So true. You can't argue with those numbers. Can you? Nope. Well, here's what we think they look at. Let's, let's run through that. And then we've got a few little points. What are we breaking it down to eight points here that we think you can work on to improve the SEO of your podcast. So the first one is engagement. Things like downloads, reviews, listen length, subscribes. If you can get people binging on your podcast, listening to episodes back to back, all that sort of stuff makes sense that these platforms are looking at, right?

ARTHUR: Listen length. That's an interesting one. So they obviously can see how long someone's listened to an episode. The longer they've listened to an episode, the higher it's going to rank. Yeah. It's because you do a lot of the uploading. Yep. All transparency. So just curious as to how that listen length works.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And I'm just thinking about a platform like YouTube, for example. Yeah. Any platform wants to keep you on the platform consuming content so that they can make money off ads. Sure. Of course. That's YouTube. That would be Spotify, for example, with their podcasts. If people are staying there and listening to long episodes and then going on to listen to the next episode and the next one, they're really good retention and engagement signals. So I would imagine it's similar to YouTube in the way it works. If you can get more of that, it's going to be good. Obviously reviews is a big one as well. Just like all platforms, the more positive reviews you have, the better you're going to do. So the other thing we think they look at is the written content that you use when uploading a podcast. So you can put keywords into the name of the episode, the title, the description, like the show notes, that sort of stuff. Yeah. Obviously if you are wanting to be found for SEO podcast, if you're mentioning that throughout titles and descriptions, then it's very simple for that text to be parsed and understood and help with rankings visibility.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I made the comment before it's very similar to YouTube SEO. Hmm. when you're trying to get YouTube videos to rank. Yeah. Basically apply that knowledge and shift it over to podcasting.

MICHAEL: Yep. I would say that's about right based on what we've seen. This segues nicely to the next point, actually. I don't know if you know, but YouTube, they like, if you upload a video to YouTube, it's audio to text transcription to create captions is next level. Like, Even with our bogan accents, it understands what we're saying and will automatically generate really accurate captions.

ARTHUR: So whenever I watch a YouTube video and it's got closed captions, that's YouTube's algorithm.

MICHAEL: Well, it's not always, you can also upload captions that you've created, whether it's done manually or using different tools, which we'll cover. But these days when I upload stuff, I've just been letting YouTube auto magically figure out what's being said and it works really well. Really? Interesting. So this is in my opinion, no doubt being used in Google podcasts. Yeah, definitely. Like they would just actually listen to episodes, figure out what's in there with this same tool that they use in YouTube. So they can understand what's being spoken about on the shows and then factor in when deciding what to show in like carousels in the search results and maybe results in the Google podcasts app.

ARTHUR: Yeah. That's, that's crazy.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: It's come a long way since the old days of teletext. It has. I don't know if you remember, but yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Like it'd be in like an office, like a doctor waiting room and it would be on the screen.

ARTHUR: That just horrific, horrific. Get every second word wrong. And you're so laggy. So yeah. Well done. Well done YouTube for figuring that out.

MICHAEL: And I'm in, in the next section, next little bit. I have some tools for transcriptions we'll cover off. Some of them are better than others, but, um, look, these three areas, engagement, written content, audio content, pretty much sums up the areas that you can focus on based on what we've done with our show, our sample size of one, but let's, let's get into the nuts and bolts and run through it and give you some actionable stuff that you can use. If you're planning on starting a podcast or already have one and want to try and get better visibility for it. Let's dive into it.

ARTHUR: Let's dive right into your goggles on. I've got my goggles on. I've got my headphones off. My goggles on.

MICHAEL: Nice. That's how you roll. I like it. Let's do, let's go with our general advice. First and foremost, publish consistently.

ARTHUR: Do you know how often we publish? I do. We try to do it weekly. Occasionally we might miss a week here and there, but generally it's a weekly show. So yeah.

MICHAEL: What you don't want to see is inconsistency. Yeah. Daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, whatever. You just don't want long lulls in between posting. Yeah. Kind of like, you know, if you're trying to build up a social media profile or your YouTube account, you've got to be consistent.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, if you're advertising a weekly show, then obviously people have the expectation that you're going to have an episode every week. So, um, you need to cater to your audience and make sure you plan ahead and make sure that you have episodes ready for the foreseeable future. Otherwise you're probably going to drop the ball and get lazy and stop recording.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And it could be as simple as missing a week or two and then it's like a switch has been flicked and I'll get to it when I get to it.

ARTHUR: I feel like we all kind of went through that phase at the start a little bit.

MICHAEL: We got interrupted by COVID in a big way.

ARTHUR: We did. We still managed to bust out a few episodes via different tools on Riverside. They were pretty good.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I think so. The key is just to be consistent because well, if you, if you plan ahead, like we said, you know, if you plan out what a logical and let's say sequential coverage of your topic looks like. So like with us, with SEO, we started from the very beginning and broke it all down and our early episodes were very like information heavy. But then after that we started broadening into, you know, Q and A's and stolen from social and guests and all the rest of it. If you plan things out like that, not only do you keep your consistency, you know, I guess up, you also are covering the topic in depth. You know, if you, if you plan out all the episodes and really brainstorm everything that you think you should do to cover a topic, then if Google sitting there listening to it and figuring out what's being said, it's like topical authority in SEO.

ARTHUR: Do you think that there's a bare minimum someone should be recording like once a month?

MICHAEL: I would say that because as a listener, People will want to get in like a cadence of routine of listening to you. And if people like, I have some podcasts that I've subscribed to in the past and they stopped for ages and then they pop up out of nowhere and you almost forget who they are or you lose interest. Yep. Yep. So for me, like daily is way too hectic. Even weekly can be tough to keep to, but I would say weekly or fortnightly is probably about right for most subjects.

ARTHUR: I mean, you can change it around as well. You can start off weekly and as you go, as you grow, you can taper off and do it fortnightly or vice versa. It just depends as long as it's consistent. Yeah, exactly.

MICHAEL: Then, like we always say with SEO, podcasting is a time game. So podcast SEO is no different. Like, unless you have a really massive audience to tap into right away, you're going to be grinding for a year or more to get some runs on the board. Like we have. Yeah. So, yeah, keep consistent even when there's no immediate obvious feedback. Excuse me, I've been holding that cough in for about 30 seconds.

ARTHUR: I was wondering what you were doing with your face.

MICHAEL: I look like a duck trying to eat a big piece of bread or something. Anyway, that was fun. So with the name of your show, this is general advice still doesn't hurt to work keywords in like our show, the SEO show.

ARTHUR: Pretty good. It does what it says on the tin.

MICHAEL: Yup. So if you can work keywords into your title, that's going to help. It's the same as with the domain name, you're going to rank it easier if it has keywords in it from, you know, if we're talking SEO.

ARTHUR: And then finally. Preparation. It's a big one because I find if we prepare, the more we prepare, if we kind of sit down before the show and kind of run through what we're gonna talk about, we generally have a much better episode that flows a lot better. A few episodes in the past, I think back on, the worst ones are the ones where we've just kind of dived into it and we don't know who's gonna speak. We don't know what the next person's gonna say. So preparation is key. Like in most things in life. Yeah, don't wing it. No. Unless, yeah, don't wing it.

MICHAEL: Depends on the, you know, if it's just a chat then maybe, but like, yeah, if there's any sort of structure to the topic, make sure you're prepared. Yeah, winging it normally hurts. All right. So anyway, that's some basic stuff out of the way. Let's talk nuts and bolts of what you can do. And we're going to start with the website for your show.

ARTHUR: So I'll take over this topic. Yup. So really, you know, you just need to create a website, a simple website and do basic SEO on it. So what we did was we created the SEO show.co basically you, you created it, but basically it was just a profile site. with, I guess, an about us, about our show, who we were as co-hosts. And then obviously just links and was it links and just videos of the show on YouTube and all the different podcasting platforms where people can find us.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And then every episode is on there.

ARTHUR: And then every episode, yeah. But really essentially what it was, was just doing SEO as you would on any other site. So making sure that your metadata is optimized, that you're targeting the right keywords, making sure that you have the content on the page. bit of link building here and there. I'm not sure you don't add the transcripts too.

MICHAEL: I did when we were doing it back in the day. Yeah. Because I figured having the transcripts on the page for each episode just helps that page when it's getting crawled. It it's like coming back to topical, like it's just a lot of content. for Google to be able to crawl. So it helps like now we rank number one for SEO podcast and it's because we have this site that's optimized for that keyword. But a lot of the supporting content is transcripts of us talking about SEO.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Do you still do that or is it? Well, the tool we use, the quality really, for some reason has dramatically dropped. That was Otter. Otter. Yeah. It can't even tell the difference between you and me. Oh really? So it used to know who we were and then that little hiccup has been enough for it not to happen for a while. And then the consistency's gone. Coming back to what we were talking about.

ARTHUR: We sound completely different. I think.

MICHAEL: Yeah. It seems to struggle with Australian accents. Like when we have American guests on, it normally nails what they're saying and then really gets stuff wrong with us. But I'm what I would say as well with that, like with your website, link to your website from your podcast host and your socials, ask your guests to share the episodes and link back just to, you know, get easy wins on the link building side of things.

ARTHUR: Have we gotten any juicy backlinks from any of, no, I want to say our guests, but really they've been your guests.

MICHAEL: You know what? I don't know. Could go look in Ahrefs. We'll have a look after this. Yeah. So let's move on from that. It's pretty basic. We've done about 50 episodes on how to do SEO now, so we don't need to talk about that for this website, but let's talk about the actual podcast side of things. So with the podcast, they have to be hosted somewhere. If you are already running a podcast, you would have a host. If you're looking to start one, you're going to need to pick a host. We use Buzzsprout for our show, but there's a whole bunch of them out there. Most of similar in let's say Buzzsprout when you're setting the show up, you can pick relevant categories like tags. So it might be. For us, we've picked our main categories business, the subcategories marketing. Sure. Um, makes sense. Yep. That does a lot of sense. And then, you know, Google podcasts, Apple podcasts, they use those categories when deciding where to show the show. So make sure you're filling all of them out. I think in Buzzspout you can pick three categories. Apple will only use two of them, but other players will use all of them. So just fill everything out that you possibly can in the settings, in the backend of the podcast host.

ARTHUR: And is it, is there a price to host it or is it a free service?

MICHAEL: I know it's not free, but it's next to nothing. I would say it's like 10 bucks a month, something like that. And kind of just like a website host.

ARTHUR: Okay. And excuse my ignorance. Cause obviously you do a lot of this stuff. I'm just the color commentator, but when you hosted on something like boss sprout, does it syndicated to all the different, um, podcast, I guess. Yes. Like Spotify, Apple podcast, Google podcast. So it's just a one upload, click a button, and then it just gets pushed out to.

MICHAEL: It's not as easy as clicking a button, but you need to go in there and set it up in Apple podcast, Google podcast, Spotify. Like you'll get little accounts with each of those platforms. Okay. So it's like linking. Yep. And then there's also a thing, it creates an RSS feed that you can submit to like a whole bunch of other things like podcast addict and pod chaser and I heart radio and all that. And then other platforms, if, if you submit yours to Apple, other platforms just sort of scrape apples and then immediately list any new podcasts in theirs as well. Okay.

ARTHUR: So it's a little bit of work, but not too much. So when, for example, if I'm listening to, again, it might be a weird question, but if I'm listening to our podcast on Spotify, it's actually hosted on Buzzsprout. Yeah. So it's not hosted on Spotify by Spotify. No.

MICHAEL: Okay. Interesting. Yeah. So it's a little fun fact. It is a fun fact. And I've just checked, you're looking at $12 USD per month for a basic, there's a free one. but you don't want the free one. It like chucks ads on, I think, and it will only host them for 90 days. So I think we pay $12 a month, which means we can price to pay. Yeah. We can upload three hours. So depending on how much you're uploading, obviously it goes up from there, but three hours a month.

ARTHUR: Yep. Okay. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So I'll show you.

ARTHUR: So we better speed it up. Cause yeah, time is money using valuable time. Yeah.

MICHAEL: All right. Well once that's done optimize your episode titles just like in SEO for a website You should be working target keywords into your titles Don't stuff it You know, you don't want to go name of the show and then just add a whole bunch of keywords at the end But if you're covering a topic there should be opportunity to work keywords naturally into your titles. Mm-hmm pretty straightforward Another area that you can have an impact is show notes. So show notes are basically the content that goes with the episode in the podcast host. And then different players will show some of that. You know, if you go into Apple podcasts or Google podcasts on a web browser, you can read all of the show notes, maybe on a mobile device, it shows a little snippet of it. Yep. About what the show or that episode is about. Exactly. So the way we do else for FYI, we have the exact same, I'm learning with everyone here, which is amazing. Yep. We have the exact same stuff at the end of every episode where we're just talking about like our agency and we linked to it. Then we linked to our. website and to our YouTube channel. And then above that, we write a quick synopsis about the episode, you know, what was spoken about, who was on the show, keywords related to it. And then we link out where relevant to other websites. So cool guest websites or things spoken about in the show, like a tool, like if we were banging on about a tool, you can link to that. Yep. So it's just like on a normal website that you're trying to rank for SEO, linking out to something can be like a good signal that, you know, you're covering a topic well. Yeah, basically. Then we also, we don't do it. We haven't been doing it lately, but transcripts of your episode is a quick win because it's all automated, but basically you can submit the audio file from the podcast to a tool. It will listen to it, figure out what was said and then spit out a whole bunch of text. A transcript of the episode timestamped. Most podcasts hosts will allow you to upload the transcript in its own section for each episode, which helps with like understanding, finding index ability of those episodes. Yeah. You can also publish it to your own website to support the episode on the website. Cool. So tools we've used, do you know what they are?

ARTHUR: Let me quickly scroll down the list. I know Otter, but I know that because you mentioned that it wasn't picking, it wasn't doing good transcriptions. Basically it had a hard time distinguishing between you and me and that's been garbage. So that's disappointing.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So originally I used to get the transcription back and go and like edit it and tweak it. Not the whole thing, like bits and pieces, depending on how long I felt like doing it for. Yeah. Then in the end I was just like, can't be bothered copy and paste the whole thing in. And it's getting, you know, let's say 65% of it. Right. So that's going to be enough context there for all these tools to understand. when it really couldn't understand the difference between you and I, then we stopped doing it for a while. So that's otter.ai. Um, relatively cheap, but it's quick and gets, you know, it largely right. There's another tool called rev.com, which I don't know if it automatically listens or if it actually has people doing it, but you basically submit a file and a couple of hours later you get your transcription back. Wow. And it's pretty accurate, but it's more expensive. So it can work out relatively, you know, you'd be paying a few bucks per episode to do it. Probably not worth it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Just trying to imagine someone listening with headphones and quickly typing away.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I don't know if that's what it was. I haven't really looked into it.

ARTHUR: It might be a combination of some sort of audit like tool and then someone just QCing it and fixing up any issues that they've picked up on.

MICHAEL: Probably because the accuracy is much, much, much higher in that, but it's slower and costs more. But as we said before, even without us doing that, we believe Google can understand what's being said in the episodes because of it's like the tech it uses to do the, the YouTube audio to text transcriptions. And like, I don't know, Spotify, Apple, they're probably, they've probably got stuff going on as well. Yeah, they would.

ARTHUR: Yep. Most definitely.

MICHAEL: So, um, yeah, even these days, maybe transcripts not as important in terms of your actual episodes, but like putting it on your website. Again, if you're trying to rank your website for terms, then that's not going to hurt you in any way, shape or form. So another one, a big one. Second last one here is begging and pleading for reviews and subscriptions. We have tried to automate it by putting a little ask at the end of every episode. Please leave a review. It would really help the show. Don't know that it does much. We've, we've got like 10 reviews, I think. Yeah.

ARTHUR: In all time. But I mean, you mean the reviews don't do much because the reviews would absolutely help.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I don't think us asking at the end of every episode does much.

ARTHUR: Are we asking or are we begging? That's the thing.

MICHAEL: Well, we say, please leave a review. It would really help the show or something like that. So, but the key is like that takes nothing. It's been recorded once we put it there and maybe you get the odd review here and there out of it. The point is you've got to be asking.

ARTHUR: Yeah. That's like, you know, YouTube subscriptions and reviews help the algorithm and help you rank in all the different podcasts. what do you call them?

MICHAEL: Players, I guess. Yeah. Like the main ones being Spotify, Google podcasts, Apple podcasts. That's generally what we care about. I know reviews are a big one on Apple. Like there's been examples of people in the past, totally gaming it by going out and buying a ton of positive reviews on Apple. Um, we're not suggesting you do that.

ARTHUR: Is that something that can, that people can get away with there?

MICHAEL: I don't know. Like they're like, you can go on Fiverr for example, and there's people selling reviews of Apple podcasts, like, Yeah. And then one individual person will go review your podcast for you. So I haven't tested it, but I can imagine it might work.

ARTHUR: Because with Google reviews, there's a footprint. You can see the person's profile. You can quite easily see whether or not it's a real person or not. I've never reviewed anything on Apple podcasts, but potentially. What, you haven't even reviewed our show? No. I only just got an iPhone three weeks ago. So it's all new to me. I don't think I've even opened Apple podcasts. I reviewed us on Spotify. Okay.

MICHAEL: Well, I think, um, after this show, we might have 11 five-star reviews on Apple podcasts, but the key is beg, plead family and friends ask every episode and just try and get the reviews. Do it naturally. That's going to help with the all podcast visibility. The last one, what do we got for the last one?

ARTHUR: The last one is to promote your episodes on social media. So share it on your personal and business socials. Um, I've actually created a Twitter for myself and started sharing that as well to my zero followers. But I guess the whole idea is just get to spread the word. Yeah. Get the podcast out there. Yep. Um, get in front of people.

MICHAEL: Yep. And then ask your guests to share it too. Like often if you're bringing guests on, they might have a bigger network so you could tweet. At tag them, it was like awesome chat, blah, blah, blah. And then they're going to share it. Um, that sort of stuff, I guess, drives traffic to the show and probably more engagement.

ARTHUR: Yeah, for sure. Like it's all about reach and getting it in front of as many people's ears, I guess, as possible. You did that episode recently where the guy had hundreds of thousands of subscribers and- Yeah, Craig Campbell.

MICHAEL: That was more, we put that on YouTube and it overnight had like 10,000 views.

ARTHUR: Yeah, it's amazing. So promoting that and sharing it with all the guests and has worked.

MICHAEL: Okay. And that's pretty much it, isn't it? Like based on the last year, There's no, I guess, easy wins, quick wins. It is a grind. You've got to be consistent. You've got to pump this stuff out. If you work across all of these points over time, you're going to have some wins. One thing that I also want to cover off is if you want to keep on top of this and see how well you're doing, pretty cool tool is chartable.com. It's free, or at least I haven't had to pay for it yet. So I'm sure they have paid versions, but basically you can track your podcast in there and it will monitor your podcast performance in the charts on Apple and Google and that sort of stuff. So you can see how you're going and see if your efforts are having the desired result over time.

ARTHUR: where just a little fun fact, we're number 226 in the marketing podcasts in Portugal.

MICHAEL: There you go. Which is weird. You would think they'd be listening to Portuguese episodes. Well, they're not. But like, for example, I think we've been as high as 19 in marketing in Australia. That's amazing. You know, we're up there with some big shows. Yeah, a hundred percent. Nothing special has led to that other than consistency and hitting on everything that we've covered off in this episode. So that's about all we have to say about podcast SEO. Two noobs when it comes to podcast SEO, but those tips are going to help. That is all for this episode. We'll be back next week with another episode of the SEO show, but until then. Happy.

ARTHUR: No, I was going to say happy international podcast day.

MICHAEL: Yes. Have a very happy international podcast day. And, uh,

INTRO: Thanks for listening to the SEO Show. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We'll see you in the next episode.